20 soldiers treated for rabies after foxes attack

With permission from the Nature and Parks Authority, the IDF killed two apparently rabid foxes that sent 20 soldiers to the hospital after they attacked them last week, an army official said on Sunday.

On Tuesday, as they were sleeping, the two foxes entered the soldiers’ tent on the Tzrifin base in central Israel and bit some of them.

In total, 20 soldiers were taken to the nearby Assaf Rofeh Medical Center and given treatments against rabies, the senior army officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

According to Haaretz, which first reported on the incident, not all of the soldiers who were hospitalized were bitten; some were treated as a precautionary measure.

On Thursday, the army trapped and killed the two foxes, after they received the go-ahead from the nature authority.

The foxes’ corpses were sent for testing to determine if they did indeed have rabies, the officer said.

“But either way, if they attacked people, we had to do it,” he added.

The soldiers were from the Home Front Command’s training base in Tzrifin, known in Hebrew as Bahad 16.

“The Tzrifin base commander immediately passed along information about the incident to the relevant bodies in order to prevent similar incidents from recurring,” the army said in a statement.